In this article we explore the relational materiality of fragments of human
cadavers used to produce DNA profiles of the unidentified dead at a forensic
genetics police laboratory in Rio de Janeiro. Our point of departure is an
apparently simple problem: how to discard already tested materials in order to
open up physical space for incoming tissue samples. However, during our study we
found that transforming human tissues and bone fragments into disposable trash
requires a tremendous institutional investment of energy, involving negotiations
with public health authorities, criminal courts and public burial grounds. The
dilemma confronted by the forensic genetic lab suggests not only how some
fragments are endowed with more personhood than others, but also how the very
distinction between human remains and trash depends on a patchwork of multiple
logics that does not necessarily perform according to well-established or
predictable scripts.

Journal Article

Publication History:

This essay analyses the literature on the foibe to illustrate a political use of human
remains. The foibe are the deep karstic pits in Istria and around Trieste where
Yugoslavian Communist troops disposed of Italians they executed en masse during World War
II. By comparing contemporary literature on the foibe to a selection of archival reports
of foibe exhumation processes it will be argued that the foibe literature popular in Italy
today serves a political rather than informational purpose. Counterpublic theory will be
applied to examine how the recent increase in popular foibe literature brought the
identity of the esuli, one of Italy‘s subaltern counterpublics, to the national stage. The
paper argues that by employing the narrative structure of the Holocaust, contemporary
literature on the foibe attempts to recast Italy as a counterpublic in the wider European
public sphere, presenting Italy as an unrecognised victim in World War II.

Journal Article

Publication History:

From 1945 until around 1960, ceremonies of a new kind took place throughout Europe to
commemorate the Holocaust and the deportation of Jews; ashes would be taken from the site
of a concentration camp, an extermination camp, or the site of a massacre and sent back to
the deportees country of origin (or to Israel). In these countries, commemorative
ceremonies were then organised and these ashes (sometimes containing other human remains)
placed within a memorial or reburied in a cemetery. These transfers of ashes have,
however, received little attention from historical researchers. This article sets out to
describe a certain number of them, all differing considerably from one another, before
drawing up a typology of this phenomenon and attempting its analysis. It investigates the
symbolic function of ashes in the aftermath of the Second World War and argues that these
transfers – as well as having a mimetic relationship to transfers of relics – were also
instruments of political legitimisation.

Journal Article

Publication History:

The Khmer Rouge forbade the conduct of any funeral rites at the time of the death of the
estimated two million people who perished during their rule (1975–79). Since then,
however, memorials have been erected and commemorative ceremonies performed, both public
and private, especially at former execution sites, known widely as the killing fields. The
physical remains themselves, as well as images of skulls and the haunting photographs of
prisoners destined for execution, have come to serve as iconic representations of that
tragic period in Cambodian history and have been deployed in contested interpretations of
the regime and its overthrow.